Tuesday, November 2, 2010

"...To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn), There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn), And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to be born, a time to die, A time to plant, a time to reap, A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep..." - The Byrds - "Turn Turn Turn"

It is the eve of the General Election here in America, November 2, 2010, and every single race with very few exceptions are extremely close, meaning of course that for every one American, another wants to vote opposite!

We are seeing the intense coverage, the pollsters and the pundits, all analyzing and assessing the figures as they emerge from right to left, from East to West. Almost predictably, the Right has the Right and the Left has the Left, meaning that a Democrat is likely to be elected in Hawaii, and California too, and a few Republicans will be elected in the Right.

Of course it is never as simple as that. Tom Brokaw had an interesting comment to make on the NBC Nightly News analysis show with Brian Williams. In fact it was very insightful. He said that it is now never the same every two years. Also he mentioned the fact that the Tea Party has had an effect on the Republicans, who have never been so diverse in living memory, with new diversity members headed for Washington!

And Sara Palin is telling the President that "...enough is enough", deploring the change in America. It would seem that much of America feels the same...

And just to add to the mix, the Hispanics are coming out in force as voters. This will be a challenge for Harry Reid in Nevada since he probably needs to learn how to say "Muchas Gracias" said José Diaz-Balart of Telemundo, commenting on this overwhelming majority of Hispanics in today's political arena, another new phenomenon.

Other stuff - there has never been quite so much money spent on political campaigning ever before, particularly here in California. Meg Whitman spent hundreds of millions on her campaign, where over two thousand commercial messages would be seen promoting her campaign each day on television. It makes you wonder how Jerry Brown could even be predicted the winner of this race! However, thinking a little deeper, this means that he has the backing of a lot of special interest groups.

The truly crazy thing about this is that it will all be over tomorrow. True, the politicians will have to get to work, but the voting will all be over. However, don't let's forget, the pattern is now similar to Europe, that of stalemate, where nobody is truly satisfied. half vote one way and the other votes the other. I saw the same thing happening in Great Britain where a Labor Party (British version of Democrats) win over and over in a highly marginal race kept occurring. In the end an unelected Prime Minister (a phenomenon that could only occur in Great Britain) stepped down to a sigh of relief from everyone British, and now the Conservative (Republican) Prime Minister is busy dismantling all the programs that the outgoing party put in place (when the country could barely afford it!) In situations like this, there are many more truly unhappy people, so the politicians are going to have to work a lot harder to solve the real problems, and amazingly enough, after all the hype, the recession is still here in America, 9.6 million are unemployed and nothing about it has really been fixed!